The ebook cover of ‘L.A. Ladies’. It is now available for pre-order of Kindle

Today is definitely a happy day! After working on this novel for a year–off-and-on–it went live on Kindle, Nook and Kobo at midnight. I have a ‘slight misadventure’ to report, however. Yesterday at a little after 4 p.m. I received an email from Amazon telling me ‘L.A. Ladies’ was live. It was eight hours earlier than I thought, but I assumed that Amazon must function on Greenwich Mean Time–that’s near London–and it was just after midnight there. So I activated two advertising campaigns. When I got around to looking at the actual page on Kindle, the order button still read ‘pre-order now’.

Did I lose some sales? I don’t know. This morning my pre-orders appeared as sales, so everything is running fine now.

In this novel Robin, who has lived a privileged life in Los Angeles, begins anew after the unexpected death of her husband and finds herself in situations she never dreamed she would encounter. Love and danger seem to be turning her new life upside down. And the collie on the cover? Her name is Pretty Girl and she plays an important role at two turning points in the book.

Tooting my own horn here! My new novel, ‘L.A. Ladies‘ is now ready for pre-ordering on Kindle. You can find it here and read more about Robin, a ghost-blogger who is re-starting her life after the death of her husband. (And–Yes!–a collie is a character in the novel.)

The paperback edition will published on February 18th, too.

This romance-mystery is available for pre-order at other online bookstores, including Nook and Kobo. Coming soon on iTunes and Scribd.

The ebook cover of ‘L.A. Ladies’. It is now available for pre-order of Kindle

In the romance novel ‘L.A. Ladies’ Robin goes for walks along the L.A. River. This photo is of the frog gate leading to one path along the river.

I spent all day yesterday listening to the latest draft of my novel, ‘L.A. Ladies’. That’s right, I listened to it using a nifty feature in Word that I didn’t previously know existed. The feature is called ‘Speak’ and I decided to use it to see if I could find any ‘ghost words’ in my manuscript. ‘Ghost words’ are those little leftover words that accidentally end up in revised copy. When an author re-reads the revised section, her eyes slide right over the ghost words because, after all, she ‘knows’ what the passage says. The eyes and brain play tricks.

In one writers’ group online a fellow author suggested I read my manuscript aloud, but I wasn’t at all confident that the eye-brain trick wouldn’t happen again.

Instead I decided to use ‘Speak’ and sat here at my computer following the words with my eyes while Microsoft Anna (the voice of Speak and it’s a semi-mechanical sounding voice!) read to me. Much to my horror, I discovered a ghost word in the first chapter. Somehow the word ‘handed’ had been left in a sentence right beside ‘handing’. I quickly deleted ‘handed’ and kept on listening to Anna. Two other ‘ghost words’ showed up later in the novel and in one other instance I discovered that I’d written ‘on’ instead of ‘of’. All were fixed instantly. What is also important to note is that these four tiny errors in my manuscript were all properly spelled so they would have gone right through the Kindle Spell-Check and not shown up as mistakes.

Another discovery I made while listening was that in an early meeting between Robin, the main character, and one of her love interests, she sounded bitchy instead of surprised. So I re-wrote that exchange, too. Then checked it again with Speak to make sure there were no ghost words in my revision!

Okay. If you’re interested in using Speak — and I highly recommend this approach–search Google for text-to-speech in Word and follow the steps to activate it. It’s really easy and can save you from serious embarrassment.

Later: When I posted about this topic on my FB wwriter’s group I learned from other writers there is also a text-to-speech function in Adobe’s pdf reader as well as several free programs available online. I might try them to see if those other voices are more pleasant than Anna’s.

Oh, one last thing. Anna sometimes reads ‘is.’ at the end of a sentence as ‘island’. At other times she read ‘no.’ as ‘number’. She apparently ‘thinks’ they are abbreviations.

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Books I’ve published

Looking for a retiree travel job? This best-selling guide will show you where and how to land work and earn money while traveling. Now on Kindle, Nook and Kobo

A #1 best-seller on Kindle! Read how retired women and men earn earn extra income from part-time work. Many are based on hobbies. Now on Kindle, Nook and Kobo.

A romantic mystery about mid-life love, danger, triathletes, a blogger and a collie dog character! On Kindle, Nook and Kobo.

A newbie vampire named Cate has nothing but problems as she flees cross-country in her old RV. What happens when she gets stranded? Now on Kindle, Nook and Kobo.